Value of $100 in 1944, adjusted to 1964

What happened to prices between 1944 and 1964

Between 1944 and 1964, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.6 to 31. Cumulatively, prices increased 76.1%, which works out to an average of 2.87% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1944 bought what $0.57 buys in 1964.

Consumer prices rose just 1.7% in 1944, down from 1943’s 6.1% and the slowest increase of the war years, as price and wage controls held the cost of living nearly flat even as the conflict reached its most expensive phase. The war itself turned decisively that June, when more than 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, opening the long-planned second front against Nazi Germany. Congress used the same month to plan for the war’s end, passing the GI Bill on June 22 to give returning veterans money for college or vocational training, low-cost home and business loans, and unemployment benefits, a package that would reshape American housing and higher education for a generation. The following month, delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and agreed to peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar, itself pegged to gold, creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to manage the new system. Consumer prices stood 77.8% above their 1913 level, a cumulative wartime rise held down by controls that would start unwinding the following year. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 30 cents an hour.

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The destination year: 1964

Consumer prices rose 1.3% in 1964, matching 1963’s pace even as a large federal tax cut took effect that year. The Revenue Act of 1964, signed February 26, lowered individual and corporate tax rates significantly, the cut Kennedy had proposed the year before his death and Johnson pushed through Congress as a Keynesian bet that lower taxes would spur enough growth without stoking prices. Congress reshaped civil rights law that July 2, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin in employment and public accommodations, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Vietnam policy shifted that August, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution after reported attacks on U.S. Navy destroyers, authorizing Johnson to use military force in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. American pop culture changed that February too: the Beatles landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport and played the Ed Sullivan Show two days later for an estimated 73 million viewers, igniting the “British Invasion.” Consumer prices finished 1964 213.1% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 5 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.25 an hour.

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